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Monday, September 23, 2013

Stones

Magic isn’t big on fundamental
truths, but one is that it sets you apart. There are people, and then
there are magicians. There are people for whom the world is solid and
real, and then there is the rest of us. It’s one reason magician’s
die out: they go mad. Another is giving up the magic to be ordinary,
which is often a worse price than dying. Or so I’m told.

It never even occurred to me that
someone could give up magic
until after I’d had it three years and ran into an ex-magician. He
had all the patter down pat, quick and ugly as an anti-smoking
advert, but the hunger in him told other stories, whispered of other
needs. I almost put some magic in him to see what would happen but I
wasn’t that nasty. I walked away.

I’m not walking
away now. Just walking. I’ve left Jay and Charlie in the hotel
room: she’s teaching him card games, he’s getting over being
embarrassed at his voice. I have a god-eater teaching a not-vampire
from Outside the universe card game in a hotel room and I don’t
consider myself mad. I figure it’s a sign of something, but I don’t
know what. I don’t know why I was drawn to them – or they to me.

Magic can offer up
omens, but it’s mostly feelings. Hunches, twinges, odd pauses in
the world. Right now it is silent. Waiting, content? I don’t know,
so I walk side streets of a small town and ease pressures in the
world. Bricks pressed tight to each other that will echo out into a
fight between parents, fix loose paving stones that rattle underfoot.
I’ve been getting noticed lately and it’s wearing and tiring in
equal measure, so I press small magics into the world to hide such
things, turn some signals into smaller noises.

The third paving
stone I fix rattles after, something under it fighting my will. The
creature that flows out from under asphalt is a dark grey cloud
little larger than my hand, voice heard only in my head.

“This is mine,
magic man!”

“A stone?”

“My mine,” it
says, and under the words I get rain and slick steps. Two broken legs
in as many years, all the food it needs and enough small chaos in the
world to keep it happy.

I could move it to
the step of someone who deserved it, but I’m tired of thinking
people deserve hurt. “If you keep hurting people they will destroy
you. Roads are repaved,” I say.

“Mine!” All
small and sullen, unable to see further than itself.

I wonder, for half
a moment, if it is a mirror, and then shove the thought away. It’s
a scrap of bad mood turned into something more: that it lasted two
years is perhaps unusual, but a good hate can last most of a lifetime
sometimes.

Curses are always
stronger than blessings. Best not to think too hard on why.

“Here,” I say,
and offer up an image/idea, of almost breaking legs, almost tripping
people. The power to touch more lives, to send spasms of fear through
dozens of people over what could have been. It wavers, swirls, then
accepts the offer and flows back into the earth.

I head back toward
the motel, not sure if I feel better but at least not feeling worse.

Ah! Probably will change it, as 'patter down pat' is more a Britishism and the stories are set in America. And glad you find them interesting: info. about them is doled out slowly, as Charlie/the god eater really has no idea what a god really IS at present [the magician claims that by telling her he would limit her, but the odds are very good he's lying about some of that...] and Jay technically was a vampire for, oh, half an evening it seems. His story gets more complicated since even the magician/(mostly) narrator isn't quite sure what Jay really is yet.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”